1- What is an application and how does it benefit businesses?

An application, also described as an application program or application software, is a computer software package that performs a specific function directly for an end user or, in some cases, for another application. An application can be self-contained or a series of programs (Rouse, 2019).

According to (Medium, 2017) there are 9 benefits of using an mobile app and here are some of them:

– Mobile apps are faster to reach and deal with.

– Instant online and offline access for users.

– Beneficial for branding and design.

– It provides productivity in improvement and helps by cost reduction.

– Helps business increase SEO potential for the business website

2- How could YouTube.Music benefit from developing the app? how different is it from other competitors?

YouTube.Music should develop it’s application to gain new customers and maximise profit by selling more subscribes to customers.

The application is crucial for Youtube.Music because of the following reasons:

• Engagement of customers: YouTube.Music should ensure that customers engage with them using the application as the audience could be found anywhere (Gazdecki, 2017).
• (Statista, 2019) 26% of the people spend more than seven hours daily on their smartphones as shown in (figure 1) , they should take advantage of that and gain a wider number of customers.
• Mobile apps increase the brand awareness by letting customers easily post, share, or tweet about your services.
• It gives more value to customers, because more users prefer mobile devices to desktops.

Taking Spotify, YouTube.Music’s biggest competitor, as a sample. Spotify has benefited from it’s application even though it was free to download and recently free to listen to the entire catalogue on tablets.

First of all Spotify used it’s application as a platform for advertising and marketing,  And to avoid and skip the ads users must subscribe to Spotify Premium, Therefore it is a case of win/win.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek argued that Spotify Premium is beneficial because tablet users (application) can download music and listen to it at anytime (Griffith, 2014).

To put all what was stated in numbers, Spotify has benefited from the application $576.5 million in revenue in 2013 only (Griffith, 2014).

3- What are the downside of apps ? and how can it be avoided?

As much as mobile apps are beneficial, But there are always some downsides for developing an app due to the following findings:

• High cost of developing an application.
• Difficulty of keeping an up to date data for customers.
• Chance of false information by developer.

However a journal article by (Adinugroho, Reina & Gautama 2015) quoted  “Our approach using combination of mobile web and native technology consumes more data over the network compared to a regular native mobile application or hybrid application. This is because regular native mobile application and the hybrid application has their own layout and interface installed on the platform. “, the solution was the following in their opinion. “they only need to pull the required data in a form of data structure while our approach need to retrieve the whole layout and data in the form of web page which consists of several files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.”.

4- Framework of application success?

There are many ways to asses if the application was successfully launched , or if at least being improved.

Realising how much people spend time on their application is a sign of success if it was over a certain number of hours per day, week ,month and year. And if comparison to competitors within the same field is possible it could be better for assessing how successful it is.

Number of downloads from both the App store and PlayStore, also shows how big the market share is in the applications and mobile phones industry, number of downloads of all time, last three months and recently.

Ratings is the biggest sign of how successful the application is, is it 4 stars rated or more? is it low rated? why? is the right customers voting or targeted?

And finally comes the feedback on forums or live chat rooms if found, what is better than customers saying what changes they want? is there any better way of knowing the application is doing fine or terribly other than knowing it from customers themselves?, Surveys and comment sections are the best place to expect these feedback comments to estimate of the app was a success or a failure and if a failure what needs to be done?.

5- Conclusion:

In conclusion, for the mentioned advantages of mobile apps and after knowing how limited the disadvantages are. It is worth mentioning that YouTube.Music could benefit from developing it’s application, and by using the framework work suggested in this blog. Mistakes made and disadvantages can be avoided.

6- References:

• Adinugroho, T, Reina & Gautama, J 2015, ‘Review of Multi-Platform Mobile Application Development Using WebView: Learning Management System on Mobile Platform’; International Conference on Computer Science and Computational Intelligence (ICCSCI 2015), pp. 291-297.
• Gazdecki, A. (2017). How Musicians Can Benefit From Creating Mobile Apps. [online] hypebot. Available at: https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2017/01/how-musicians-can-benefit-from-creating-mobile-apps.html.
• Griffith, E. (2014). Spotify is now free on mobile. So why bother subscribing?. [online] Pando. Available at: https://pando.com/2013/12/11/spotify-is-now-free-on-mobile-so-why-bother-subscribing/.
• Medium. (2017). 9 Advantages of Mobile Apps over responsive eCommerce websites. [online] Available at: https://medium.com/@KNOWARTH/9-advantages-of-mobile-apps-over-responsive-ecommerce-websites-6aed1e6db0d8.
• Rouse, M. (2019). What is application? – Definition from WhatIs.com. [online] SearchSoftwareQuality. Available at: https://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/application.
• Statista. (2019). Smartphone daily usage time worldwide 2017 | Statistic. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/781692/worldwide-daily-time-spent-on-smartphone/.

7- Appendices: 

Figure 1 (Number of hours spent of mobile phones daily)

(Statista, 2019)